She paused. ‘What?’
‘A knife,’ Slater said. ‘I’d like to keep one overnight. Just in case.’
King nudged him in the ribs, but Slater persevered. Sure, they had a couple of switchblades in their packs from the hostiles they’d encountered the previous day, but there was a world of difference between an enormous kitchen knife and a rusting box cutter.
The woman seemed to have got the message that they were here to investigate the murder. Ordinarily she might have scoffed, but now she shuffled off and came back a moment later with a serrated butcher’s knife made of thick steel. She placed it on the table in front of Slater and raised an enquiring eyebrow.
He nodded, and took it by the hilt.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ King muttered.
‘Am I?’ Slater said.
She showed them to their rooms.
31
In the middle of the night, King tossed and turned in his sleeping bag.
Wide awake.
Coated in sweat.
He’d drifted off for a spell, but it wasn’t obscenely cold yet and the bag was designed for sub-zero Celsius temperatures, so the result was an abundance of body heat trapped within, heating him up until the perspiration ruptured from his pores. He stuck his arms out and stretched them behind his head, clasping his hands together. He stared up at the ceiling.
There were a thousand thoughts churning, and he figured the constant state of war-readiness in his mind had changed him permanently. Something about that wide-eyed porter set him on edge. In all likelihood, the guy was exactly how the owner had described — an awkward drifter searching for any work he could get on the trail.
But King’s brain never stopped whirring, so the bugging eyes and intense stare had lodged there, leaving him to mull over the memory.
He tried to cool down and listened to the roof creaking above his head. Wind battered the side of the building, and he wondered if he was staying in the room Winston had died in.
The room Oscar Perry had probably strangled him in…
Don’t assume.
The wind suddenly intensified, swelling to a crescendo and rattling the pane beside his head.
King looked across the room. Sure enough, the other bed was empty. He and Slater had opted to take separate rooms this early in the trek. Later on, they’d huddle together in closer quarters for maximum efficiency but right now it’d only draw attention. A pair of grown men sharing a room when every bed in the teahouse was available would stand out from the norm. And until they got close enough to Raya to act, they had roles to play. They were ordinary hikers. Friends tackling a gruelling trek together.
So King had his gear sprawled across the other mattress, and Slater had the room next door.
Weak flickers of light spilled in through the window, emanating from white bulbs stationed at intervals along the patio outside. They stayed on all night evidently. King sat up and watched the trail fade away into darkness. Eventually he got sick of it and tried his best to get back to sleep.
Then he heard a footstep.
Instinct kicked in. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint where it came from, and there was an overwhelming possibility he was just paranoid, but he leapt out of bed all the same. Dressed in a pair of athletic shorts and nothing else, he padded across the room with bare feet and pressed one ear to the door.
It burst open in his face.
The door actually smacked him square in the forehead, coming scarily close to concussing him. As his neck snapped back and he put a foot down to find his balance, the sleek black barrel of an automatic rifle slipped through the newly-opened gap in the doorway. It had been locked, but whoever was on the other side had snapped the weak thing apart with a single charge. King had blocked most of the initial trajectory with his own skull, so even though there were glowing spots in his vision he managed to throw his weight back into the door, hitting it shoulder-first, trapping the gun between the frame and the door.
Then he calculated angles and figured, Yeah, go for it.
He threw the door back open and snatched the rifle — a Kalashnikov AK-47 — by the lower handguard and wrenched it, along with its owner, into the room. He was firing on all cylinders, with sheer survival energy coursing through him, and that always translated into uncanny strength, so the guy holding the weapon ended up catapulting forward uncontrollably.
The man tripped over the threshold and tumbled into the room with shock spreading across his face.
Amidst the blur of adrenaline, King just managed to recognise that the guy was wearing faded military fatigues before he stabbed down with the ball of his foot an inch above the guy’s ear. He might as well have hit the guy with a steel bat. All the technique and power and nervous energy translated into the mother-of-all impacts, and if the man wasn’t dead he was close to it.
King snatched up the AK and turned it toward the door and caught two more mercenaries shoulder-to-shoulder, in the process of muscling their way into the room. They had fearsome-looking curved knives in their hands, ready for use in case their comrade with the rifle failed.
And he’d failed spectacularly.
But they were out of range. It’d take them a couple of steps to get into the room and another second to swing the blade, and that was time they simply didn’t have because now King had the Kalashnikov aimed squarely at their faces.
He didn’t hesitate.
He shot the closer man through the forehead, then put three rounds into the chest of the second man.
Two corpses toppled backward out of the doorway, and the echo of the gunshots roared down the mountainside.
32
Slater vaulted out of bed before his brain even woke up.
It was instinct — he heard the blam-blam-blam-blam of four unsuppressed reports, which carried the same shock to his system as if someone had hit him in the face
